KESENNUMA, Miyagi Prefecture--It took nearly a year, but Jennifer Suzuki, Fe Murakami and Maricelle Takahashi--three survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami--have finally gotten what they’ve waited for: Their turn in the media limelight.
KESENNUMA, Miyagi Prefecture--It took nearly a year, but Jennifer Suzuki, Fe Murakami and Maricelle Takahashi--three survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami--have finally gotten what they’ve waited for: Their turn in the media limelight.
“You know some people here are really good at putting on fake faces,” says Suzuki, as her two friends giggle. “How is it that they’re always in front of the television cameras and in the newspapers--unlike us. We’re victims, too, but until last week, no one has ever talked with us.”
That’s probably because the three women--a former bar owner and two nightclub hostesses who also work at a seafood processing plant during the day--hardly fit the role called for in the disaster narrative. The hard-struck Tohoku region, after all, is known for its resolute, quiet-abiding natives.
The cheery trio are Filipinos, married to Japanese men in the fishing town of Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture.
“That’s the way we are,” says Murakami, who has lived 17 years in the town. “On the outside we’re always laughing, but in our hearts we’re crying”--to the appreciation, and sometimes to the annoyance--of family and neighbors in the tightly spaced temporary housing units where they’ve had to relocate since their homes were washed away.
The steady flow of international volunteers to Tohoku has drawn lots of interest, as have Chinese employed by the fishing industry as trainees, who were bused out of the disaster zone by their government and are slowly returning now. But few have taken notice of the Filipino community, says Nobuko Murakami, a liaison to foreign residents for Kesennuma City Hall.
“No embassy bus came to pick them up, but I don’t think they would have ridden anyway,” says Murakami, who has worked in the foreigner affairs section since its founding nine years ago.
The town had a count of 74,000 residents before the tsunami, with nearly 500 foreign residents, the great majority Chinese or Filipino women married to Japanese, on its census. Now the population has dipped to below 70,000, with 260 of the foreigners remaining.
“We saw during the disaster that some nationalities leave and some stay. Filipinos stay,” says the official. “The Chinese women for the most part said, ‘I have a child, I want to go home.’ The Filipino women resolved to stay because of family. A lot of people around here were surprised by that. Perhaps the real reason was their solidarity--they’re very tight with each other and thought, ‘If you stay, then I’ll stay too.’ ”
To be sure, it’s no easy matter entering into a Tohoku family--with three or more generations still under a single roof--and take on the universal challenge of nagging in-laws.
“Here in the provinces the word ‘oyome-san’ has a different meaning than just ‘bride,’ ” says Amelia Sasaki, a 35-year resident of Minami-Sanriku, a municipality next to Kesennuma where 10 of 11 Japanese-Filipino families are now living in temporary housing.
“It means, indirectly, that you’re a housemaid: You do everything in the house, but when it comes to family matters you have no voice.”
When Sasaki first married, for example, her husband forbade her from working outside--lest she neglect her household duties. So the Filipino set up an English language class in her living room, drawing children from around the neighborhood. When her own two kids reached school age she joined the local PTA and then landed a position teaching Japanese to newly arrived foreigners at Kesennuma City Hall. Twenty years later it was clear who was running the Sasaki household: She forced her husband to give up fishing and to open a small eatery next to their local Shizukawa Station instead.
The station and the house were leveled last year, so the husband now runs a food stand at the entrance to a nearby temporary housing community.
“Today I’m not considered a foreigner but a local," she says. The reason wasn’t the disaster, which in one day brought about an equality that might have taken years to achieve.
“I’ve always tried to help out and show the town that I'm not waiting for people to do something for me, but that I’m waiting for them to ask me what to do for them.”
Sasaki offers a different explanation for her compatriots' willingness to stick it out.
"Japanese are unlike us, we're able to make friends everywhere. It takes them a really long time to open their hearts, and it's the same with our children," say Sasaki, who gave up speaking English to her own children so they wouldn't be bullied for having a foreign mother in this small community.
"The (foreign) mothers don't want to leave this place because their children's friends are here. They know they'll have a hard time making new ones elsewhere."
That's an aspect that 22-year-old Takahashi, among the youngest mothers in the Filipino circle in Kesennuma, will have time to discover in her adopted "furusato" (hometown).
For now she's working in one of the town's few operating seafood plants, while her husband--a bartender in the club where she used to sing--assembles clothing.
"We could go somewhere else and find different jobs, but I don't want to do that to my grandparents," she says. "This is their furusato, it's the only place they know. Anyway it’s comfortable here, it's a lot like the place I came from. You look around and think, 'There's nothing here.' It doesn't look like much, but it’s a good place to raise some children.”